A Colder War

by Charles Cumming

  Kell was conscious that he had gone too far. The entire restaurant was filled with couples and families and groups of friends, none of whom appeared to be talking to one another. They had come to one of Rachel’s favorite Thai restaurants, and the plink-plunk of piped music became as grating as nails being dragged down a chalkboard.

  “Rachel?”

  “What?”

  There it was again; the sudden, flared anger of their first night in Istanbul, her face a sullen, disappointed mask. This time, however, Kell knew that she was not drunk; he had hit a nerve of impatience and grief and Rachel’s mood had collapsed as a consequence.

  “Sorry,” he said. “That was stupid of me. Let’s talk about it another time.”

  But she remained stubbornly silent. Kell tried to start a conversation about a book they had both read, but the ill feeling between them crackled like static and Rachel would not respond. He was irritated by how quickly the easy romantic rhythms of the evening had been dismantled. Perhaps, for all of the sex and conversations, the thousand e-mails back and forth, they would always be relative strangers to each other.

  “Let’s not do this,” he said. “I’m sorry. I was being insensitive. I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

  “Forget it,” she said.

  But the evening was over. They sat in prolonged silence to a background of harps and pipes, Rachel looking off to one side of the restaurant, her face sullen and bored. Kell, stirred by a mixture of frustration and fury at the sudden change in her behavior, proved incapable of reviving her mood. Eventually Rachel went to the bathroom and he asked for the bill. As they walked out of the restaurant five minutes later, accosted by the grayness and the litter of a damp, ill-lit east London street, Rachel turned to him and said: “It’s probably better if you don’t stay.”

  Kell felt the fury inside him simmer, but did not reply. He could still hear the plink-plonk of the music receding behind them as he turned and walked away. The romantic in him was crushed with disappointment; the man of reason and experience merely raged at Rachel’s overreaction. Kell cursed himself for talking about Ankara, but cursed Rachel still more for lacking the patience and the goodwill to let his remarks pass.

  He did not turn around. Nor did he respond when he felt his phone vibrating in his pocket. Instead, he lit a cigarette, walked to the Underground station, waited on a crowded platform for the last Central Line service of the night, and returned in silence to west London. Emerging from the lift at Holland Park station half an hour later, he saw that Rachel had twice tried to call him; she had also sent a text message containing a single question mark. He did not respond. Instead, he stepped out onto Holland Park Avenue and took out a packet of Winstons. A man and a woman walked past him, arm in arm. The man asked for a cigarette and Kell gave him one, lighting it wordlessly and receiving effusive thanks in return. There was a smell of dogshit in the air: Kell couldn’t tell if it had been on one of the couple’s shoes or was just general to the area. He began to walk east, not yet heading home, and was gripped by a determination to work. Revived by the cigarette, he hailed a taxi and was at Redan Place in less than five minutes.

  There was no security guard on duty downstairs. Kell let himself into the building using a fob key. He rode the lift to the fourth floor, only to find the door to the office propped open by boxes piled three high on the ground. The lights were on in one of the larger rooms halfway down the corridor, the flickering shadow of someone moving around. Kell called out: “Hello? Anybody home?”

  The movement ceased. Kell heard a grunted “What’s that?” and saw Harold Mowbray’s face looking out into the corridor. Harold was squinting, trying to bring Kell into focus. He looked like a man peering into an oven to see if his dinner is cooked.

  “That you, boss? What you doing here this time of night?”

  Mowbray had been the Tech-Ops man on the operation to find Amelia’s son. Good with microphones and miniature cameras, good with one-liners to break the tension.

  “I was going to ask you the same thing,” Kell replied. “It’s good to see you.” He was surprised by how much he meant it. The kinship of old colleagues came as a relief.

  They approached each other in the gloom of the corridor and shook hands.

  “So what’s going on this time?” Harold asked. “Amelia got a secret daughter she doesn’t know about? I felt like we were in Mamma Mia! on the last gig.”

  Kell laughed, ignoring his regret at how stubborn and shortsighted he had been not to call Rachel back.

  “Cousin we have concerns about. Ryan Kleckner. Based out of Istanbul. He’s in London for four days, has a crash meeting at some point that he won’t want anyone witnessing.”

  Harold nodded. Kell went back to the main door and flicked a switch, strobing the lights in his office. Harold confirmed that he was happy with the coverage in the two rooms at the Rembrandt. Kell had obtained the names and addresses of the Facebook girls and told Harold to wire their apartments for sound, not sight. The Georgetown dinner was booked for Wednesday night at Galvin, a restaurant on Baker Street. They briefly discussed the possibility of wiring a table, but concluded that it would be pointless. Instead they would have taxis in front of the restaurant timed to coincide with Kleckner’s exit.

  “That’s more Danny’s bag, yeah?” Mowbray was referring to Danny Aldrich, another veteran, who would head up the surveillance team in the absence of Javed Mohsin.

  “True,” Kell concurred. “At some point Kleckner is going to try to disappear.” Harold was standing in Kell’s office. Both men were smoking cigarettes, having pushed the windows wide open. “We’ll only have seven people watching him, eight max. Ideally I’d like to get something onto him, either some dust or a microphone.”

  “Yeah, Amelia mentioned that.”

  Kell looked up. “She did?”

  Harold looked as if he had spoken out of turn. Kell had the impression that he was concealing something. He remembered his conversations with Amelia in Istanbul: the sense of parallel operations taking place without his knowledge, of privileged information being withheld.

  “What do you mean?” he asked, stubbing out the cigarette. Harold turned and walked back into the corridor. Kell followed him to the closed-off area in which he had been setting up the Rembrandt surveillance screens. He could not see Harold’s face as he said: “You know. Usual stuff. What’s the latest tech, what can we do to ensure eyes and ears on a target.”

  “And what can we do?”

  Harold recovered and shot him a trademark grin. “I’m working on it, guv,” he said. “I’m working on it.”

  43

  Ryan Kleckner boarded Turkish Airlines flight TK1986 at Istanbul Ataturk Airport at 1730 hours on Tuesday, April thirtieth. Fifteen rows behind him, Javed Mohsin settled into a window seat, placed his Pakistani passport in the inside pocket of his jacket, inflated a travel pillow, and went to sleep. Five hours later, following a delay in the air, Mohsin was watching ABACUS flash a diplomatic passport at Terminal Three immigration, thereby cutting out a snaking line that would have delayed the American by at least forty-five minutes. Mohsin telephoned ahead to a second surveillance officer in the baggage area, confirming Kleckner’s outfit—white Converse sneakers, blue denim jeans, white button-down shirt, black V-neck sweater—and giving a description of his carry-on bag (a molded black wheeled suitcase with a Rolling Stones lips sticker peeling on the left panel) as well as the leather satchel from which he was rarely parted. ABACUS had no checked baggage and would be mobile in the terminal building within less than three minutes.

  The second officer—known to the team as “Carol”—picked up ABACUS as he walked into the baggage area and called ahead to Redan Place when she saw him buying a SIM card from an automated machine in the south corner.

  “Which brand?” Kell asked. He was sitting in the smallest of the six rooms, the one he had chosen as his own office. Kleckner’s move was predictable, but it was nevertheless a potential headache to Elsa and GCHQ
.

  “Difficult to say. Looked like a Lebara pay-as-you-go.”

  “Has he fitted it in the BlackBerry?”

  “Not yet. Negative.”

  Carol followed ABACUS through the automatic doors at customs and established line of sight with a third watcher—Jez—who had joined the massed ranks of minicab drivers clustered in arrivals. Jez was dressed in a cheap black suit and holding a sign with the name “Kerin O’Connor” scrawled on the front in green marker pen. Lowering the sign, he turned and tailed ABACUS at five meters while Carol moved ahead, taking up an advanced position on the platform of the Heathrow Express in anticipation of Kleckner choosing to travel into London by train.

  As it turned out, he took a cab. Jez texted the license plate to an SIS vehicle idling near the Parkway intersection at junction 3 of the M4. With Jez on a follow, the driver of the vehicle picked up the ABACUS cab as it paused at a set of traffic lights three hundred meters short of the motorway. Both cars tailed the target into central London and housed ABACUS at the Rembrandt Hotel. Carol went back to Paddington on the Heathrow Express, then made her way to a restaurant in Knightsbridge awaiting further instructions from Kell. Jez parked in a mews behind the hotel and hoped that he would be able to get some sleep; the driver of the second SIS vehicle was called onto a separate job. Javed Mohsin went home to his wife, whom he had not seen for more than six weeks.

  * * *

  Every detail of Kleckner’s arrival was relayed live to Redan Place. As soon as ABACUS was on the road, Kell had called Danny Aldrich in his room at the Rembrandt. Harold had piped the hotel’s surveillance cameras to Aldrich’s laptop so that he could keep an eye on the corridor outside Kleckner’s room, as well as the lobby and front and side entrances. If the American checked in and went walkabout, Aldrich would form part of the mobile surveillance team attempting to follow him. If he ordered room service and went to sleep, most of them would get an early night.

  As it turned out, Amelia was right about Kleckner’s desire to switch rooms. Having checked in to 316, which had taken four painstaking hours to rig with cameras and microphones, the American made a cursory assessment of the room before returning to reception and requesting an upgrade. A female officer on secondment from Australian SIS was role-playing the Rembrandt receptionist—with the connivance of the hotel manager—and reacted quickly and calmly to Kleckner’s request, even throwing in the bone of a “lovely view over Knightsbridge.” ABACUS was duly reassigned a room on the top floor of the hotel that had also been wired for sight and sound.

  Kell wondered at Kleckner’s motive. Did he simply want a more pleasant room, or did he have concerns about liaison surveillance? If the latter was the case, was the American simply being cautious, or did his decision speak of a gathering paranoia?

  “We just have to hold our nerve,” he told Amelia on the phone just after ten o’clock.

  “We do, Tom. We do,” she replied, and with that announced that she was going to bed.

  It became a long night. Kleckner took a shower in his room, ordered a club sandwich, then changed into a pair of jeans and a fresh shirt before heading out into the late London evening. Jez, who had briefly fallen asleep in the mews, awoke to a telephone call from Kell instructing him to drive in loops around ABACUS while Aldrich, Carol, and two other foot surveillance officers tailed the American into Kensington.

  It transpired that he had made a date to meet a Lebanese girl at Eclipse, a bar on Walton Street. The youngest female member of the team—Lucy—entered the bar ten minutes later, where the attentions of two Dubai-based businessmen briefly interfered with her efforts to photograph Kleckner’s companion.

  “She’s about twenty-five,” she told Kell, speaking to him from the bar. It was almost impossible to hear what she was saying. “The name I heard was ‘Zena.’ They are intimate. They’ve either met before or he’s on a promise.”

  “Why didn’t we know about her?” Kell asked Elsa, texting Danny and instructing him to hold on Walton Street. It had been a long time since he had heard the phrase “on a promise.” “Who’s Zena?”

  Elsa shrugged. “Maybe the new SIM?” she said.

  Kell had asked for one of the separating walls in the office to be dismantled so that there would be a larger communal area in which the various members of the team could sit. An extra sofa had also been brought in from a shop on Westbourne Grove. Elsa was lying on it, staring up at the ceiling, tired and faintly irritable.

  “It is always the case that people have e-mails, sites, new IPs that they can use to make contacts.”

  “True,” Kell replied. “But we still need to get hold of that SIM.”

  Kleckner was another hour at Eclipse, leaving with Zena as the bar closed. Lucy had allowed the Dubai businessmen to pay her bill and had left in their company half an hour earlier, thereby giving Kleckner—had he noticed her—the impression that she had intended to meet the men and was not a surveillance threat. As soon as she had left the bar, however, she brushed off the men and returned home, “red” for the duration of Kleckner’s visit on the basis that he would recognize her as a repeating face should she continue to follow him.

  Meanwhile, Aldrich had purloined a dummy black cab from the Security Service and was able to tail Kleckner and Zena to a nightclub at the eastern end of Kensington High Street. With Lucy out of the game, Kell was aware that they were down to a team of only five. He could not risk sending another watcher into the venue. He had a hunch that Kleckner would get the girl drunk, take her out onto the dance floor, then suggest a nightcap at the Rembrandt. That was his normal Istanbul modus operandi and it seemed highly unlikely to Kell that Kleckner would break off, on the cusp of a one-night stand, to meet Minasian.

  So it proved. Just after three in the morning, Kell had a text from the receptionist confirming that ABACUS was “back in his room with a woman (Arabic appearance, mid-20s). Both drunk/flirtatious.” Switching on the surveillance screens, Kell and Harold were able to see Zena frantically brushing her teeth in the bathroom while a shirtless Kleckner searched the minibar for champagne. The bedspread had been disturbed, suggesting that the pair had already kissed.

  “Lucky bastard,” Harold muttered. “What I would give to be twenty-nine again.”

  “I’m sure a lot of women feel the same way,” Kell replied. “Take Zena. If she had a choice tonight between you and Ryan, and you were staying in the hotel, well…”

  “Well it’s no competition, is it? She’s only human.”

  Harold switched off the audio feed from the bathroom. The television had been turned on in the room and tuned to a music channel. There was a song playing that Kell didn’t recognize.

  “Shall we leave them to it?” he suggested, remembering the first night with Rachel at the Londres.

  “Good idea,” Harold replied, and they moved next door.

  44

  Zena slipped away before seven o’clock. Kleckner, who had been pretending to sleep, got out of bed as soon as she had left the room and checked the time on his watch. Having visited the bathroom, he dropped to the floor and completed fifty rapid push-ups, a series of stomach crunches, and a leg-strengthening exercise in which he assumed a sitting position against the wall. Kell had seen it all before in Istanbul, but it was Harold’s first glimpse of the ABACUS beauty routine.

  “I knew there was something I forgot to do when I woke up this morning,” he said.

  Kell, who had grabbed three hours’ sleep on a mattress in his office, said: “Me too” and patted his stomach as he walked down to the kitchen.

  By eight o’clock, Kleckner was eating a virtuous breakfast in the hotel restaurant—muesli, fruit, yogurt—watched by Aldrich on the first floor. Eight surveillance officers were scattered around the neighborhood—one with Aldrich, two more in the Addison Lee Renault with Jez, three on foot in Knightsbridge. Elsa had coverage of the Wi-Fi in Kleckner’s room, as well as his Turkish cell phone, but still nothing on the Heathrow SIM. There had been no hint, in any of t
he ABACUS traffic, of Kleckner’s plans for the day, nor had he contacted Chater in Istanbul. Kell knew in his bones that the American was going to try to make a break from surveillance.

  Just after nine fifteen, Kleckner was reported to have left the Rembrandt and to be heading east on foot—directly toward Harrods. He was wearing a baseball cap and three layers of clothing, including a black jacket that could be removed at any stage, effecting a change in appearance. Kell, leading the operation from the hub in Redan Place, ordered Jez to Harrods and put his two officers inside, one in the western corner, one in the Food Hall. Two others were sent ahead to Harvey Nichols.

  The first sign of Kleckner’s intention to shake off possible liaison came as he turned south on Beauchamp Place, less than a hundred meters from the entrance to Harrods. On Walton Street he turned right once again, effectively doubling back in the direction of the Rembrandt. Kell pulled the officers out of Harrods and put them back in the Renault with Jez. Aldrich, who had been idling in the black cab on Thurloe Place, picked ABACUS up on Draycott Avenue and managed to follow him into Pelham Street. Carol, dressed in running shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt, was hooked up to headphones that allowed her to hear Kell’s feed from the hub. She jogged west along South Terrace, staying parallel to Kleckner’s position, then picked him up as he reached the Underground station at South Kensington.

  “He’ll go for the Tube,” Kell announced, and wasn’t surprised when Aldrich reported that Kleckner was making a phone call in the pedestrianized area immediately west of the station.

  “Can we hear that?” he called across to Elsa.

  Elsa had a constant line into Kleckner’s BlackBerry, but shook her head. Either the American was talking on the new SIM, or—more likely—was garbling nonsense into a dead mouthpiece while taking the time to make a complete observation of his surroundings. Any repeating faces? Anything out of place? Ryan knew all the tricks. Javed Mohsin had lived with them for six weeks.